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National Review: Locke’s Radical Claims for Conscience

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Perhaps the most undervalued quality of a great mind or, at least, an awakened mind is the willingness to abandon cherished ideas that cannot stand up to new evidence. English philosopher John Locke possessed such a mind. And a good thing, too: His revolutionary thinking about political and religious freedom laid the cornerstone for liberal democracy.

This is one of the understated themes of In the Shadow of Leviathan, by Jeffrey Collins. The burden of Collins’s book is to examine the potential influence of Thomas Hobbes on Locke’s early political thought about the rights of conscience. At first blush, it seems an unlikely project. In his most controversial work, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes sought to constrain religious expression and make it subservient to an omnipotent state. Locke, by contrast, viewed religious liberty as an inalienable right and essential to the concept of self-government.

Collins does not substantially challenge this historiography, but he offers the most searching examination to date of the relationship between these two seminal thinkers on the issue of religious freedom. His bold conclusion: “Locke’s liberalized account of conscience had Hobbesian roots but flourished only when planted in new soil.” Many Locke scholars (including myself) would disagree, arguing that Hobbes’s vision of an instrumental, privatized religion never held much appeal for Locke, who considered questions of faith to be of supreme moral significance.

The influence of Hobbes on 17th-century political thought is a hotly contested question in the intellectual history of the early-modern period. Yet it is not an arcane debate. At home, America faces unprecedented challenges to the moral legitimacy of its founding principles of freedom, equality, and government by consent. Meanwhile, the most serious geopolitical threats to liberal democracy involve two Hobbesian states, Russia and China, where religious institutions are either suppressed or function as tools of the regime.

Hobbes and Locke both experienced the trauma of the English Civil War (1642–49) and the political instability of the Commonwealth (1649–60). The execution of King Charles I and the elimination of the monarchy — supported by militant Calvinists inside and outside of Parliament — left a deep impression on them. Hobbes became something of a moral cynic. He believed that individuals were free and equal in the “state of nature,” but that there was no natural moral order to govern society. As he argued in Leviathan, the only way to avoid a “perpetual war of every man against his neighbor” was for every citizen of the commonwealth to surrender his rights to an absolute sovereign.

The same Hobbesian principle of subjugation applied to the institution of the church:

It is the civil sovereign that is to appoint judges and interpreters of the canonical Scriptures; for it is he that maketh them laws. . . . In sum, he hath the supreme power in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil. . . . And these rights are incident to all sovereigns, whether monarchs or assemblies; for they that are the representants of a Christian people are representants of the Church. For a Church and a commonwealth of Christian people are the same thing.

Locke never doubted that there was a “law of Nature,” which originated with God and framed man’s moral purposes. But the sectarian violence of his day made him deeply suspicious of political radicals appealing to the authority of the Bible.

As Locke summarized it in his earliest work, Two Tracts on Government, written in 1660, “there hath been no design so wicked which hath not worn the Vizor of religion, nor Rebellion which hath not been so kind to itself as to assume the name of Reformation.” Collins sees “broad Hobbesian influences” in works such as the Two Tracts, where Locke wrote that the political authority should have “absolute and arbitrary power” over “indifferent actions” of religious believers. In this early stage of his career, Collins argues, Locke shared Hobbes’s view of “a contractual state serving temporal ends, of a monopolistic sovereignty trumping the liberty of the church and constantly watchful of clerical conspiracy.”

Collins makes a painstaking case for a Hobbesian connection to a young Locke, but he seems to overplay his hand. He concludes that “Locke wrote on fundamentally Hobbesian themes in a context saturated with polemical disputes over Hobbes’s influence.” But this presumes too much for Hobbes, who was one author among many, and gives too little attention to Locke’s diverse reading in politics, philosophy, and religion. Although he was familiar with Hobbes’s arguments for political absolutism, in the corpus of Locke’s documented reading and note-taking there remains a striking deficit of explicit references to Hobbes.

What seems indisputable is that Locke broke decisively — radically — from Hobbes on the rights of conscience in political society.

First, political absolutism was a hateful doctrine to Locke, because the purpose of government was to protect man’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property. No rational person should imagine that an absolute ruler — who was not himself subject to the law — would honor this fundamental aim. As Locke wrote in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), anyone who believed “that absolute power purifies men’s blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read but the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced of the contrary.” As Collins nicely summarizes it, religious conscience “marked a hard limit to state power and was fundamental to Locke’s theory of popular resistance.”

Second, unlike Hobbes, Locke was not a materialist. Collins correctly observes that “his writings and correspondence revealed a devotion lacking in Hobbes.” That’s something of an understatement, however. Locke devoted enormous energy to exploring the meaning of the Christian faith, collecting sermons and works of theology, and writing commentaries on Paul’s epistles in order to understand better the means of salvation. His singular defense of religious freedom, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), bears the imprint of a devout reader of the Bible. Indeed, Locke believed throughout his life that “every man has an immortal soul, capable of eternal happiness or misery” and that “there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity.”

Third, while Hobbes made a pragmatic or political argument for limited toleration — he agreed that the magistrate had no interest in policing private beliefs — Locke framed his case for religious freedom in decidedly moral terms. If neither Jesus nor his apostles coerced people into the kingdom of heaven, he reasoned, neither could the magistrate. “If the Gospel and the apostles may be credited,” he wrote, “no man can be a Christian without charity and without that faith which works not by force, but by love.” Hobbes expected citizens to ignore conscience if it clashed with the edicts of the magistrate. Locke railed against this view, declaring that it endangered men’s souls: “No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience, will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.” These beliefs anchored Locke’s defense of religious liberty as a natural and unalienable right.

Finally, Locke utterly rejected Hobbes’s vision of a Christian commonwealth, in which the church was dutifully subservient to the political authority. Hobbes claimed that “in every Christian commonwealth the civil sovereign is the supreme pastor.” Under this view, ministers enjoyed no powers independent of the sovereign. A national church, functioning as an arm of the state, would enforce orthodoxy and criminalize dissent. This, according to Hobbes, was the only way to check the religious divisions that had fueled the English Civil War. This, he wrote, was the basis for political and social stability.

Locke’s repudiation of the Hobbesian project was blunt and unambiguous: “There is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth.” In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke argued for a sharp separation between the church, with its spiritual aims, and the state, whose purposes were confined to earthly affairs. Neither conferred privileges upon the other. No matter what church the magistrate chose as his own, he wrote, it “remained always as it was before, a free and voluntary society.” Locke called this “the fundamental and immutable right” of religious communities. While Hobbes regarded religion as an institution to serve the secular interests of government, Locke declared that “the end of a religious society . . . is the public worship of God, and by means thereof the acquisition of eternal life.”

Locke’s redefinition of the purposes of church and state would accomplish a Hobbesian goal: political and social stability. In this, Locke turned conventional thinking about religious pluralism on its head. It was government meddling in religion, he wrote, that caused social unrest and civil war. “It is not the diversity of opinions, which cannot be avoided; but the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions . . . that has produced all the bustles and wars, that have been in the Christian world, upon account of religion.”

Thus emerged the Lockean ideals that ultimately defined his political career: religious freedom as a universal, natural right; equal justice for all citizens, regardless of religious belief; religious diversity as a source of social strength; and the application of the Golden Rule in civic and political life. Here are concepts completely absent from Hobbes’s political thought.

The book jacket for In the Shadow of Leviathan claims that Collins’s account “establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration.” In fact, the exact opposite conclusion should be drawn.

It is true that, in the immediate aftermath of civil war, Locke shared Hobbes’s opposition to religious toleration and the sectarian strife it apparently invited. “It would prove only a liberty for contention, censure and persecution,” he wrote in 1660, “and turn us loose to the tyranny of a religious rage.” But as England once again employed policies of persecution during the Restoration (1660–89), Locke reversed himself. He concluded that religious uniformity, enforced by the state, was a dead end.

What is remarkable is that Locke not only divorced himself from Hobbes and the Locke of the 1660s, but from the established norms and assumptions that had governed church–state relations for centuries. “I cannot but own that men’s sticking to their past judgment, and adhering firmly to conclusions formerly made,” he wrote, “is often the cause of great obstinacy in error and mistake.”

What changed Locke’s mind?

This is not a question that Collins seeks to address. He concedes that Locke’s mature view of freedom of conscience was not derived from Hobbesian premises. It required “a theory of equality understanding humanity in imago dei rather than a raw Hobbesian equality of bestial strength.” Yet it obviously required much more than this, since Locke’s contemporaries who defended Hobbesian-style conformity shared many of his core religious beliefs.

As historians such as John Marshall (and this reviewer) have argued, a likely catalyst for Locke’s role as a champion of religious freedom was his close association, personally and intellectually, with the Christian humanist tradition of Desiderius Erasmus. The “philosophy of Christ” articulated by Erasmus, which Locke encountered in England and in the Netherlands during his political exile, was itself a reaction against the violent, authoritarian impulses of Christendom. “Let us not devour each other like fish,” wrote Erasmus. “The world is full of rage, hate, and wars. What will be the end if we employ only bulls and the stake? It is no great feat to burn a little man. It is a great achievement to persuade him.”

Whatever its intellectual sources, Locke’s religious outlook profoundly shaped his liberal politics. This fact alone represents a stiff rebuke to the secular account of the rise of democracy and human rights in the West: A core tenet of the American political order — freedom of conscience — traces its origins to biblical religion. As no thinker before him had ever attempted, John Locke united liberal political principles with the teachings of Jesus. You won’t find that in Leviathan.

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Joseph Loconte is a Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. The trailer for the forthcoming documentary film series based on the book can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com.

National Review: Putin’s Bloody Leviathan

This article was originally posted at National Review.

The rise of authoritarian regimes, wars of aggression, the erosion of basic human rights, a bloody civil war, a refugee crisis in the heart of Europe — welcome to the 17th century.

Out of the turmoil of this period — what historian Paul Hazard called “the crisis of the European mind” — emerged two visions of political society that are once again competing for dominance on the world stage. One belongs to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who saw unconditional obedience to an all-powerful state, a leviathan, as the only path to security and political stability. The other belongs to John Locke (1632–1704), who argued that freedom and equality were mankind’s birthright.

Russia has become Europe’s Hobbesian nightmare. Vladimir Putin’s regime is often compared to that of the Romanov czars. But he seems more a mix of England’s Stuart kings and the absolute monarchy of France’s Louis XIV. Charles I dismissed Parliament and cracked down on political and religious dissent, sparking England’s Civil War. Louis XIV, who dubbed himself “the Sun King,” launched a series of aggressive wars in a bid to make France the dominant power in Europe.

The violence and instability of that period produced some deep thinking about the nature of man and political society. When Hobbes pondered the realities of European society, he saw a “state of nature” in chaos: a ruthless war of all against all. The only remedy, he believed, was universal submission to an absolute political authority. As he put it in Leviathan: “And though of so unlimited a power, men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse.” Throughout much of the 17th century, the Hobbesian view seemed to be on the winning side of history.

Locke stood against it. No stranger to political strife, Locke was a teenager when Charles I was executed. He watched with dismay when the Act of Conformity criminalized dissent from the established Church of England; nonconforming churches were shut down and tens of thousands of citizens were harassed and arrested. Catholic France followed suit when Louis XIV ended the policy of toleration toward its Protestant minority, sending hundreds of thousands into exile. “I no sooner perceived myself in the world,” Locke wrote, “but I found myself in a storm, which hath lasted almost hitherto.”

Like Hobbes, Locke had no illusions about the dark tendencies of human nature. Yet unlike Hobbes, he saw something beyond it: a divine plan for human flourishing that supplied the moral bedrock for government by consent of the governed. Locke’s most important political work, Two Treatises of Government, which profoundly influenced the American revolutionaries, made this religious idea its lodestar.

For Locke, the state of nature was rooted in a moral law, the obligation to protect human freedom so that every individual could pursue his God-given calling and serve his true sovereign: “Men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business, they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not another’s pleasure.”

In his feverish imagination, Vladimir Putin views the Ukrainians not as citizens of a sovereign, independent state but rather as the property of Russia. In Locke’s words, he would “reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power.” More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions of ordinary citizens have taken up arms to resist Russian tyranny. As Locke warned, whenever political rulers treat basic human rights with contempt, they “put themselves into a state of war with the people.”

Ukraine was not a model of liberal democracy before the Russian invasion. But the Ukrainians, in their words and deeds, have demonstrated to the world that Locke’s vision of human freedom remains deeply compelling. Even Putin, when he took the oath of office for his second term as president of Russia, felt it necessary to invoke the language of Lockean liberalism. “Only free people in a free country can be genuinely successful,” he declared. With his right hand resting on the country’s constitution, he gave a nod to pluralism and rejected authoritarian rule.

Many in the West wanted to believe him, wistfully imagining “the end of history,” that is, the unchallengeable triumph of democratic ideals. But there can be no holiday from history, because there is no escaping the tragedy of the human condition: The spirit of leviathan is never finally defeated.

Hobbes naïvely believed that an absolute monarch could simultaneously preserve order and justice. He might have pondered more carefully the ancient symbolism of the leviathan. In Jewish mythology, Leviathan was a primordial sea serpent, something malevolent, chaotic, uncontrollable, and beyond human comprehension.

Such is the regime in Moscow, a 21st-century version of this creature, armed with weapons of mass destruction. It presents a fearsome challenge. As the author of the Old Testament book of Job warns his readers, those who oppose it will “curse the day, who are prepared to rouse Leviathan.”

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

RealClearHistory: Realism, Religion, and the Republic

This article was originally posted at RealClearHistory.

When George Washington sought to warn Americans about the most fearsome threats to their liberty, he did not cast his eyes toward Europe, where nations were waiting, like vultures, to pounce upon the carcass of a failed experiment in self-government.

Instead, Washington challenged Americans to look within. Their greatest enemy, he wrote in his Farewell Address (1796), was “the spirit of party.” By that he meant the relentless desire to form political tribes, or factions, in order to gain advantage over others. “This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature,” Washington wrote, “having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.”

Here we are reminded of one of the great forces tearing apart contemporary America: the scourge of identity politics and the “cancel culture” that supports it. And herein lies the genius of the American Founders. They anticipated this threat to self-government because they took seriously both the nobility and the tragedy of human nature. They remained deeply sober about the prospects of liberty, even as they described their experiment as a “new order for the ages.” Like no other generation of political revolutionaries, the Founders lived in the shadow of the biblical doctrine of the Fall.

Revisiting The Federalist Papers

In The Federalist Papers—the political essays defending the U.S. Constitution — James Madison defined a faction as a group of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Echoing Washington, he insisted that “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.”

When Alexander Hamilton, another contributor to The Federalist Papers, asked why governments were formed in the first place, he answered his own question thus: “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” Hamilton denied that benevolence was the natural drift of political societies. “Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice?”

No gathering of statesmen in history reflected more carefully on the human motivations that shape political societies. Indeed, most of the Founders were as clear-eyed as the New Testament about the tendency of selfish ambition to corrupt our judgment and create “discord,” “dissensions,” and “factions” (Galatians 5:20) and thus destroy human communities.

Hamilton, who helped to draft Washington’s Farewell Address, was acutely aware of the historic tendency of republican governments to devolve into tyranny or anarchy. Despite his trust in “the science of politics,” Hamilton worried about “splitting ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt.”

Virus of tribalism ravaging politics

For the Founders, everyone’s political ambitions — no matter how noble-sounding — were suspect. “Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these,” Madison wrote, “are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.” It takes a measure of humility to suggest that your own political camp is as prone to bad motives as the opposing camp.

The Founders’ insight into the origin and persistence of factions is enduringly relevant. Unchecked, they warned, factions would become the “mortal disease” of republicanism. It is now a truism to say that the virus of tribalism is ravaging our political and civic life.

George Washington saw it coming. The spirit of party, he wrote, “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against the other, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption…through the channels of party passions.”

The Founders were not prophets, but they were students of human nature — and, to one degree or another, students of the Bible.  John Jay, another contributor to the Federalist Papers, went on to become the president of the American Bible Society. John Adams, the second president under the Constitution, argued that the Bible provided “the only system that ever did or ever will preserve a republic in the world.” 

“The Bible was the most referenced work in the founders’ political discourse,” writes Daniel Dreisbach, author of Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers. “The Bible figured prominently in the founders’ political project because they thought it fostered the religion and morality essential for republican government.” Indeed, it was their familiarity with the Scriptures, especially its teachings about human pride and selfishness,  that led them to search for political remedies to the vices that had terminated other experiments in self-government.

Religion the foundation of good politics

Thus, the Founders’ solution to the blight of factions was two-fold. First, they established a republican form of government that put hard checks on the abuse of power. Second, they insisted upon a citizenry nourished in the civic virtues that could sustain self-government. Washington captured precisely this outlook in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

For Washington — and for nearly all the Founders — the two dispositions were deeply connected. “And let us with caution,” he wrote, “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” As John Avlon observes in Washington’s Farewell, the first president of the United States “wanted America to have the steadying benefits that come from religion writ large rather than the amoral anarchy that can come from a vast vacuum of belief.”

Here we encounter what might be called the biblical realism of the Founders. They worried that religious belief could instigate deep social divisions. In Washington’s words, differences over religion were often the cause of “the most inveterate and distressing” animosities. This was one of the reasons the Founders declined to establish a national church. Nevertheless, they considered religion indispensable to nourishing the virtues that could tame the most violent political passions.

The success of their experiment in self-government depended upon it.

As Washington implored the American people: “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” The Founders gave us the political tools to reign in our worst impulses. But it remains the task of each generation to rediscover the virtues that help us put those tools to work.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

Wall Street Journal: Christendom’s Greatest Satirist

This article was originally posted at Wall Street Journal.

“I do not deny that I seek peace wherever possible,” Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) wrote at the start of the Protestant Reformation. “I believe in listening to both sides with open ears. I love liberty. I will not, I cannot serve any faction.”

No one else was talking that way from the pulpits or in the courts of Europe. In 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg, he was an obscure monk pleading for the church to reform itself. Four years later, his defense of the rights of conscience at the Diet of Worms—“Here I stand!”—created a social movement that terrified and incensed the Roman curia. Erasmus—philosopher, scholar, satirist—emerged as a singular voice urging peace, charity and mutual respect. “No one can deny that Luther calls for many reforms which brook of no delay,” he wrote. “Luther’s abrasiveness can be condoned only on the ground that perhaps our sins deserve to be beaten with scorpions.”

The authorities disagreed. The day after Luther’s act of defiance at Worms, the emperor declared him an outlaw. The Catholic Church excommunicated Luther; religious and political authorities burned and banned his writings. Princes began to choose sides in the widening Catholic-Protestant dispute. Soon all of Europe was poised for a religious-cultural war.

While declaring his fidelity to the Catholic faith, Erasmus came to Luther’s defense. Luther’s writings could not be suppressed, he said, without suppressing the gospel itself. Although Erasmus had no intention of being a martyr for Luther, he refused to call him a heretic: “The world is full of rage, hate, and wars,” he wrote. “It is no great feat to burn a little man. It is a great achievement to persuade him.”

Erasmus led a reform movement known as Christian humanism: a revival of classical learning to draw others into a deeper knowledge of Scripture and more authentic experience of faith. His philosophia Christi, “the philosophy of Christ,” was aimed at the individual believer, with an eye to the moral and spiritual transformation of society. “What else is this philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls being born again, but the renewal of a human nature well formed?”

In his satirical blockbuster, “The Praise of Folly,” Erasmus exposed the pretensions of clerics as scornfully as those of the political class. Referring to the academic hats of theologians, he warned, “Don’t be surprised when you see them at public disputations with their heads so carefully wrapped up in swaths of cloth, for otherwise they would clearly explode.” An unprincipled individual could not be a good governor, he said, because his venality would spread “like a deadly plague.” The just prince—rejecting the rage of factions and his own selfish ambition—must “give no thought to anything except the common good.”

As Christian unity began to disintegrate, Erasmus tried to avert violence. “You cannot conceivably address a credible prayer to the father of all men,” he wrote in “The Complaint of Peace,” “when you have just driven a sword into your brother’s bowels.” Erasmus constantly invoked the example of the love and mercy of Christ toward sinners, but he couldn’t prevent the religious wars of the 16th century. Protestants despised him for remaining loyal to Rome, while Catholic leaders condemned his pro-Lutheran sympathies. Luther called him “the king of amphibians,” and his works ended up on Rome’s Index of Prohibited Books.

Yet Erasmus’ spiritual outlook survived. The Netherlands, his birthplace, produced the most tolerant society in 17th-century Europe, and the English Reformation was shaped by his appeal for rational argument and moderation. English philosopher John Locke, an admirer, wrote his most important defense of religious freedom while in exile in Holland and in close contact with Erasmus’ disciples. Eventually, the Catholic Church embraced much of his spiritual vision. For decades the religious journal First Things, influential among Catholic intellectuals, has hosted an annual Erasmus Lecture.

The willingness to forsake partisanship in the pursuit of moral truth: Here is a partial remedy for the political and cultural rifts that seem to threaten our democratic republic. Jean Le Clerc, a Protestant scholar in Amsterdam, summarized the influence of Erasmus: “It cannot be doubted that he has contributed greatly to the enlightenment of his age and to preparing men to accept a day of which he himself has seen only the dawn.” America could benefit from another enlightenment, this time in the spirit of Erasmus.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Gorbachev’s Christmas Farewell to the Soviet Union

This article was originally posted at National Review.

The Soviet Union’s revolutionary experiment in Marxism-Leninism was launched, at least in part, as an assault on the beliefs and ideals of biblical religion. Religion, according to Karl Marx, was “the opiate of the masses,” a fantasy enlisted to exploit the working class. Yet, on Christmas Day, 1991, it was Soviet communism that proved to be illusory: the day when Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as president of the Soviet Union, marking its complete dissolution.

“This society has acquired freedom,” Gorbachev said. “It has been freed politically and spiritually, and this is the most important achievement that we have yet fully come to grips with.”

The irony should not be missed. Gorbachev, a lifelong atheist, personified the materialist assumptions of a political system that made its collapse virtually inevitable. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, following the 1989 democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe, was complete by the time Gorbachev made his farewell speech. Yet even in their final days, the communist leadership failed to grasp the importance of religious faith to the health of a political society.

Gorbachev entered office in 1985 as a reformer. His political manifesto, Perestroika, promised to make the Soviet Union “richer,” “stronger,” and “better.” With perestroika—restructuring—there would be “no stopping” Soviet society, and a “golden age” was ahead of them. At the same time, Gorbachev considered Marxism the inexorable force of the future. “We are motivated by the ideas of the 1917 October Revolution,” he said, “the ideas of Lenin.”

At the heart of the communist vision, however, is a degrading reductionism. Human beings, we are told, are motivated supremely by material needs. Communism strips them of those qualities that distinguish the human person from all other creatures: individualism, creativity, sacrificial love, the longing for transcendence.

“Capitalism can be utterly vanquished, and will be utterly vanquished,” Vladimir Lenin predicted, “by the fact that socialism creates new and much higher productivity of labor.” Joseph Stalin, who worshipped Lenin, accelerated the Soviet policy of converting “backward, individual farming” into large-scale “collective agriculture.” In a 1929 speech, “The Year of Great Change,” Stalin denounced the “sacred principle of private property,” which, he claimed, was “collapsing and crumbling to dust.” Two years later, the Soviet Union descended into a period of severe famine and horrific political violence.

What communism treated with contempt has proven to be one of the greatest sources of human flourishing in world civilization: the constitutional protection of private property, in all of its various expressions. This was one of the key insights of English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism.

In Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), he named “life, liberty, and property” as among the natural rights that governments were instituted to protect. By “property,” Locke meant much more than a person’s wealth and belongings. “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself,” he wrote. “The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Socialist critics of capitalism see only a clawing consumption, an economic theory fueled by greed. They ignore the profoundly religious outlook from which it emerged. Lockean liberalism insisted that every person was endowed by God with creative abilities and was called—in freedom—to engage in meaningful, honorable, productive work. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property.”

If God was the sovereign authority over all human life—the ultimate property owner—then robbing anyone of the fruit of his labor represented a crime against heaven. The West designed a political system centered on the individual as the sacred handiwork of the Creator. The chief aim of consensual government, therefore, was to safeguard individual rights, freedoms, and possessions. As Locke summarized it, “the supreme power cannot take from any man, any part of his property, without his own consent.”

Having dispensed with God, however, Soviet communism destroyed the “sacred principle” of private property. By treating individuals as means to an end—a workers’ paradise of equal social outcomes—the Politburo rationalized the systemic repression of human rights. Censorship, surveillance, show trials, purges, and reeducation camps became the norm. The result was economic stagnation and the collapse of civil society.

Most Western observers, however, failed to see what was happening. In his book After Brezhnev (1983), Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union. Their conclusion: “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.” Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed as late as 1984: “The Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

Ronald Reagan, whose deep Christian beliefs are often overlooked, discerned a religious dimension to the Cold War. “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written,” he said in 1983. “I believe this because our source of strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual,” and “it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.”

In the end, even Gorbachev seemed to agree with him. In an astonishing confession, he renounced the entire communist apparatus as both a political and a moral failure. “The totalitarian system has been eliminated, which prevented this country from becoming a prosperous and well-to-do country a long time ago,” Gorbachev said. He praised the steps being taken toward democracy, privatization, and economic freedom. “We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union was not merely a vindication of democratic capitalism, however. It offered a sober and ongoing warning to the West: Materialism, elevated to an ideology, destroys political and social life. Like any other idol, it breaks the hearts of its worshipers. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” declared the child of Bethlehem, “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The Heritage Foundation: Gorbachev’s Christmas Farewell to the Soviet Union

This article was originally posted at The Heritage Foundation.

The Soviet Union’s revolutionary experiment in Marxism-Leninism was launched, at least in part, as an assault on the beliefs and ideals of biblical religion. Religion, according to Karl Marx, was “the opiate of the masses,” a fantasy enlisted to exploit the working class. Yet, on Christmas Day, 1991, it was Soviet communism that proved to be illusory: the day when Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as president of the Soviet Union, marking its complete dissolution.

“This society has acquired freedom,” Gorbachev said. “It has been freed politically and spiritually, and this is the most important achievement that we have yet fully come to grips with.”

The irony should not be missed. Gorbachev, a lifelong atheist, personified the materialist assumptions of a political system that made its collapse virtually inevitable. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, following the 1989 democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe, was complete by the time Gorbachev made his farewell speech. Yet even in their final days, the communist leadership failed to grasp the importance of religious faith to the health of a political society.

Gorbachev entered office in 1985 as a reformer. His political manifesto, Perestroika, promised to make the Soviet Union “richer,” “stronger,” and “better.” With perestroika—restructuring—there would be “no stopping” Soviet society, and a “golden age” was ahead of them. At the same time, Gorbachev considered Marxism the inexorable force of the future. “We are motivated by the ideas of the 1917 October Revolution,” he said, “the ideas of Lenin.”

At the heart of the communist vision, however, is a degrading reductionism. Human beings, we are told, are motivated supremely by material needs. Communism strips them of those qualities that distinguish the human person from all other creatures: individualism, creativity, sacrificial love, the longing for transcendence.

“Capitalism can be utterly vanquished, and will be utterly vanquished,” Vladimir Lenin predicted, “by the fact that socialism creates new and much higher productivity of labor.” Joseph Stalin, who worshipped Lenin, accelerated the Soviet policy of converting “backward, individual farming” into large-scale “collective agriculture.” In a 1929 speech, “The Year of Great Change,” Stalin denounced the “sacred principle of private property,” which, he claimed, was “collapsing and crumbling to dust.” Two years later, the Soviet Union descended into a period of severe famine and horrific political violence.

What communism treated with contempt has proven to be one of the greatest sources of human flourishing in world civilization: the constitutional protection of private property, in all of its various expressions. This was one of the key insights of English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism.

In Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), he named “life, liberty, and property” as among the natural rights that governments were instituted to protect. By “property,” Locke meant much more than a person’s wealth and belongings. “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself,” he wrote. “The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Socialist critics of capitalism see only a clawing consumption, an economic theory fueled by greed. They ignore the profoundly religious outlook from which it emerged. Lockean liberalism insisted that every person was endowed by God with creative abilities and was called—in freedom—to engage in meaningful, honorable, productive work. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property.”

If God was the sovereign authority over all human life—the ultimate property owner—then robbing anyone of the fruit of his labor represented a crime against heaven. The West designed a political system centered on the individual as the sacred handiwork of the Creator. The chief aim of consensual government, therefore, was to safeguard individual rights, freedoms, and possessions. As Locke summarized it, “the supreme power cannot take from any man, any part of his property, without his own consent.”

Having dispensed with God, however, Soviet communism destroyed the “sacred principle” of private property. By treating individuals as means to an end—a workers’ paradise of equal social outcomes—the Politburo rationalized the systemic repression of human rights. Censorship, surveillance, show trials, purges, and reeducation camps became the norm. The result was economic stagnation and the collapse of civil society.

Most Western observers, however, failed to see what was happening. In his book After Brezhnev (1983), Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union. Their conclusion: “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government,” Byrnes said. “We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.” Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed as late as 1984: “The Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

Ronald Reagan, whose deep Christian beliefs are often overlooked, discerned a religious dimension to the Cold War. “I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written,” he said in 1983. “I believe this because our source of strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual,” and “it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.”

In the end, even Gorbachev seemed to agree with him. In an astonishing confession, he renounced the entire communist apparatus as both a political and a moral failure. “The totalitarian system has been eliminated, which prevented this country from becoming a prosperous and well-to-do country a long time ago,” Gorbachev said. He praised the steps being taken toward democracy, privatization, and economic freedom. “We have paid with all our history and tragic experience for these democratic achievements, and they are not to be abandoned.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union was not merely a vindication of democratic capitalism, however. It offered a sober and ongoing warning to the West: Materialism, elevated to an ideology, destroys political and social life. Like any other idol, it breaks the hearts of its worshipers. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” declared the child of Bethlehem, “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

—

Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: A Brief History of Individual Rights

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In his opening address at the 1945 war-crimes trials at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson accused Nazi leaders of assaulting “all those dignities and freedoms that we hold [as] natural and in­alienable rights in every human be­ing.” The horrific negation of those rights — by the agents of totalitarianism — threatened the fabric of world civili­za­tion. “The wrongs which we seek to con­demn and punish,” Jackson warned, “have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

The modern human-rights movement began almost as soon as the Second World War concluded. The scale of the calamity — 75 million people dead, most of them civilians — made a mockery of the ideals of liberal democracy. The remedy, in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, was to reassert the “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights” of all people as the basis for international peace and justice.

Over the next several decades, how­ever, liberal elites detached themselves from the moral bedrock of the civilization they hoped to defend: the literary and political canon of the West. Central to this canon is the concept of the individual. Uniquely made in the image of the Creator, mankind was endowed with reason, natural rights, and the desire to live in freedom. These ideas developed over centuries, in the interplay between the classical and the biblical traditions that have defined Western civilization and set it apart.

The ancient Greeks, despite their belief in fate, regarded the individual citizen as possessing moral agency and as a vital participant in the city-state, or polis. Thus, the Greeks were the first to break ranks with the accepted model of government — the monarchy — and chart a path toward demokratia, government by consent. The idea of individual agency, though left undeveloped, can be discerned in the trial of Socrates, even as Greek democracy was faltering. The legal establishment — the cancel culture of the day — accused Socrates of “corrupt­ing the youth” of Athens. His real crime: teaching people to think for themselves.

The Apology, as recorded by Plato, his student, is a bracing defense of the individual in search of truth:

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong. . . . I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.

What was implicit in Greek philosophy was made explicit by Rome’s greatest statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. As Cicero explained in The Republic, something other than the capriciousness of the gods was at work in the world: a moral law, of divine origin, woven into human nature:

There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be, as it were, one lord and master of us all — the god who is the author, proposer, and interpreter of that law.

The doctrine of a divinely ordained natural law, accessible to everyone and demanding our obedience, informs the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible. According to the Jews, God had a moral purpose for the human race, and Israel was the chosen actor in the historical drama. Yet the Bible is the history not only of a religious community but of individuals in community. The characters in its pages are emotionally complex, sharply drawn, utterly realistic. We know their names: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Rahab, Ruth, Moses, Luke, John, Judas, Paul, Mary Magdalene, to name a few. Much of the vitality of the Bible is found in the flesh-and-blood personalities who are part of a larger story.

The emphasis on individuals is consistent with the radical message of Jesus, proclaimed by his disciples throughout the Roman Empire: The God of the universe sent his Son to suffer for the sins of the world, to offer the gift of forgiveness and eternal life to every human soul. “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men” (Titus 2:11). Here, like nowhere else in the ancient world, the individual stands at the center of divine love. Here, in the words of C. S. Lewis, we encounter “the weight of glory,” the staggering significance of every human life.

These two fundamental concepts — of natural law and the worth of the individual — existed side by side as the Christian Church helped to build a new society upon the ruins of the Roman Empire. The ideas began to coalesce when Eu­rope developed a distinctively Christian legal system in the twelfth century, as the canon lawyers of the Catholic Church sought to reform Ro­man law to reflect the equality of souls in God’s sight.

The pagan world, despite its view of natural law, assumed the natural inequality of persons. But in the in­troduction to his influential legal commentary, the Decretum (1140), Johannes Gratian redefined the concept: “Natural law is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel, by which each is to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself.” As Larry Siedentop explains in Inventing the Indi­vidual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Gratian and the scholars who followed him “fused Christian moral intuitions with a concept inherited from Greek philosophy and Roman law.” The Gol­den Rule was being applied to political life: For the first time, individuals, rather than established hierarchies based on class, tribe, or ethnicity, became the focus of a developing legal system.

Yet despite its Christian ideals, the Catholic Church ran roughshod over the rights of individual believers. Christen­dom preserved its spiritual unity only by coercion: Dissent from orthodoxy was criminalized, heresy was rooted out and punished by fire and sword.

Into this maelstrom stepped Martin Luther, a theology professor at Witten­berg. In 1517, his posting of 95 grievances against the Catholic Church was only a hint of how the status of the individual was changing. Luther’s most revolutionary act was his defiance at the Diet of Worms, where he elevated the solitary believer — armed only with the Bible and his conscience — above any earthly authority. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand.” Luther’s campaign transformed the relationship of the individual to society. Writes Alec Ryrie in Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World, “This was the true and enduring radicalism of Protestantism: its readiness to question every human authority and tradition.”

Although Protestants could be as intolerant of dissent as their Catholic counterparts, the Reformation set the template for nearly every successful campaign for political and religious liberty in the West. The elevation of in­dividual conscience galvanized the 17th-century revolution in natural rights, for example, embodied in the writings of English philosopher John Locke.

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to argue that everyone was born “equal and independent, . . . the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker.” In A Letter Concerning Toler­ation (1689), Locke called freedom of conscience a “fundamental and immu­table right” of every person, regardless of social rank. “No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.”

The foundation for liberal democracy, which makes the protection of individual rights the basis for political society, was thereby established. A century later, in Great Britain — where the conception of rights was tightly bound to biblical teachings — the defeat of the inter­national slave trade became a national priority. William Wilberforce, an Evan­gel­ical who led the parliamentary campaign for abolition, concluded his opening address to the House of Com­mons thus: “I could not believe that the same Being who forbids rapine and bloodshed, had made rapine and bloodshed necessary to the well-being of any part of his universe.” The first concerted challenge to the institution of slavery came from within the centers of political power.

The new doctrine of natural rights also fueled the two great political campaigns for freedom in the 18th cen­tury: the American and the French Revolutions. Colonial Americans were fluent not only in the rhetoric of natural rights but also in the language and assumptions of the Bible. Herein lies the source of the majesty of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are cre­ated equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

The French revolutionaries, inspired by the Americans, also produced a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which formed the preamble to their constitution. Lynn Hunt, author of Inventing Human Rights, makes much of this, claiming that, unlike the American Declaration, the French document “provided the basis for government itself.” The American Bill of Rights, she notes, was composed after the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

But this ignores the astonishing achievement of the Framers in Phil­adelphia. The American Declaration became the ultimate preamble to the Constitution, in that the entire structure of government was designed to protect the rights and freedoms it proclaimed. Moreover, both documents were fully embraced by the moral custodians of the revolution, the nation’s clergy. “The genius of the authors of the United States Constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radi­cal Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledg­ling nation,” writes Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

By contrast, the French revolutionaries, especially the Jacobins, were guided by a militantly secular strain of the Enlightenment: For them, religion was the enemy of reason and human rights. “De-Christianization” was their policy. France quickly descended into social chaos, abolished basic civil liberties, and crowned a dictator for life.

Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Hav­ing denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Charles Malik, the Lebanese ambassador to the United Nations. An Arab Christian, Malik warned of the danger of “inverting man’s place in the universe” by demanding one’s rights while ignoring “the dominion of God over the course of history and of human life.”

The history of the struggle for freedom in the West teaches an incon­venient truth: that there is no coherent view of human personality stripped of the imago Dei. Britain’s former chief rabbi, the late Jonathan Sacks, ex­plained that the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence were anything but self-evident. “They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hier­archical society the world has ever known,” he said. “They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible.”

If this is true, then the cause of human rights cannot prevail in an utterly materialistic culture. The sublime doctrine of human dignity emerged from the rugged soil of biblical religion — and nowhere else. If it is to be renewed, it must draw life from the waters of Sinai and Jerusalem.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: What the Left and the Right Get Wrong about Liberalism

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In the deepening debate over the future of American democracy, the progressive Left and the religious Right have this in common: They both cling to nostalgic fictions about the past. Their revisionist histories, rooted in secularism on the one hand and sectarianism on the other, would propel our politics in the same direction: toward the Leviathan imagined by Thomas Hobbes, an omnicompetent state that offers security and prosperity at the price of freedom.

On the Right, the rejection of liberal democracy is motivated by a yearning for a premodern world: a society animated by medieval concepts of virtue, faith, and authority. Catholic scholars such as Patrick Deneen argue that, under Christendom, the “cultivation of virtue” and “aspiration to the common good” served as bulwarks against tyranny. But liberalism dissolved these ideas, he writes, replacing them with “civic indifference” and “the unfettered and autonomous choice” of the individual. Likewise, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule condemns the liberal project as the enemy of the historic church. “Both politically and theoretically,” he writes, “hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth.”

Behind these views is a cluster of pious — and dangerous — falsehoods about the history of European Christianity. The Catholic medieval project brought with it great reforms in law and education; it abolished slavery and established institutions to care for society’s most vulnerable. Yet, for all its achievements, Christendom failed to uphold the most revolutionary tenets of Christianity — namely, the freedom and equality of every human soul.

Indeed, by insisting that the state enforce an overarching religious identity, the church criminalized dissent, trampled the rights of conscience, and authorized a brutal, continental Inquisition to root out and punish alleged heretics. Alongside its exhortations to virtue was a culture of hedonism and materialism. The humanist scholar Erasmus, satirizing clerical depravity, imagined the apostle Peter denying Pope Julius entry into heaven: “If Satan needed a vicar, he could find none fitter than you.” On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, the crisis of religious authority was manifest: a consequence, in part, of an unholy alliance between pope and emperor.

It required the secular forces of the Enlightenment to sweep aside the superstitions and religious hatreds that stood in the way of a more just and egalitarian society. That, at least, is the narrative of the progressive Left. Under this view, epitomized by thinkers such as Steven Pinker, religious belief is inherently suspect; organized religion is considered the enemy of reason, science, human rights, and social progress. As Pinker declares in Enlightenment Now, “the moral worldview of any scientifically literate person — one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism — requires a clean break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.” As a product of the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and Voltaire, we are told, the American Founding was essentially a secular affair.

Yet the progressive account of the nation’s origins is rooted in a secularization myth, the false notion that liberal democracy emerged only after religion became privatized and marginalized in public life: the separation of church and state. Progressive historians exhibit a tone-deafness to the religious beliefs that inspired the American revolutionaries and shaped the debates over the U.S. Constitution.

In These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore offers an informed and vivid account of the American Founding but omits any significant role for the Bible, the most widely read book in colonial America. In her rendering, the Declaration of Independence contained only “secular truths,” with no discernible link to a deity of any variety. Likewise, in First Principles, Thomas Ricks traces the impact of ancient Greece and Rome on the Founders — but has nothing to say about how the Americans bracketed the classical world with a host of Christian assumptions about freedom, equality, and natural rights. In noting the influence of college president John Witherspoon on Madison’s political philosophy, Ricks fails to mention that Witherspoon was an evangelical minister, or that Madison studied theology under Witherspoon before launching his political career.

Contrary to these revisionist histories, the concept of natural rights and freedoms was not a secular idea. Rather, it grew in the soil of revealed religion, when elements of Protestantism supplied the moral and theoretical bedrock for constitutionalism. The key figure, misunderstood by progressives as well as conservatives, was the English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism.

Locke’s insight was to combine the classical idea of natural and universal rights with that of natural law, which was always thought to be grounded in the divine will. The law of Nature, Locke wrote in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), taught that every person was born free and independent, “the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, sent into the world by His order and about his business.” Everyone therefore had “a natural duty” to respect the life, liberty, and possessions of his neighbor. “They are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure.” The rulers of a Hobbesian state, by trampling individual rights and freedoms, robbed God of his divine prerogative and “put themselves into a state of war with the people.” Outside of the Bible, no text was cited more frequently by the American revolutionaries than Locke’s explosive manifesto.

Moreover, Locke’s famous argument for the separation of church and state was not motivated by anticlericalism or a desire to cleanse the public square of religion. A lifelong Anglican, Locke was outraged by the attempt, by both Catholics and Protestants, to impose religious conformity through force. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he appealed to the life and teachings of Jesus, “the Captain of our salvation,” to defend religious liberty for all members of the commonwealth. And because Locke believed firmly in a final judgment — “because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation” — everyone must be free to seek religious truth according to the demands of conscience.

Locke placed a heavy burden on church leaders to teach and model a posture of peace and goodwill toward everyone—“as well towards the erroneous as the orthodox; towards those that differ from them in faith and worship, as well as towards those that agree with them therein.” And he delivered a stern warning, as a fellow believer, that God’s judgment awaited those who ignored the plain teaching of Jesus on the matter. “And if anyone that profess himself to be a minister of the word of God, a preacher of the Gospel of peace, teach otherwise; he either understands not, or neglects the business of his calling, and shall one day give account thereof unto the Prince of Peace.”

Locke’s arguments permeated the outlook of colonial America. Protestant ministers, the cultural leaders of the day, embraced Locke’s thinking as a biblical defense of equality, natural rights, and religious freedom. Elisha Williams, a rector at Yale University, in an influential tract published in 1744, warned that whenever government was “applied to any other end than the preservation of their persons and properties, . . . then (according to the great Mr. Lock) it becomes tyranny.” Williams implored religious and political leaders to adopt “that golden precept of our blessed Lord.” As Locke framed it, “the sum of all we drive at is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” Here, at the beginning of America’s democratic journey, was the political application of the golden rule.

The religious Right fails to grasp that, in a profoundly important sense, liberalism arose as a Christian response to the failures of Christendom. Although their political agenda remains murky, they seem enamored of the prospect of reestablishing a nationalist, religious vision: a Leviathan wearing the robes of a priest. Under this vision, the exercise of raw executive power would vanquish the enemies of cultural conservatism. Hence their uncritical embrace of Donald Trump, the self-styled defender of Christian values: “Nobody has done more for Christianity . . . or for religion itself than I have,” he recently boasted.

Meanwhile, by disregarding the biblical roots of liberalism, progressives seek to expunge religious ideals from our politics. By severing universal rights from the ballast of religious truth, they debase the concept of rights and transform it into a platform for social entitlements — enforced by the state. By quashing dissent from the new orthodoxy, they summon the spirit of the inquisitor. In their desire for a perfectly egalitarian society, Hobbes would be an ally: “And though of so unlimited a power men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse.”

Here, ironically, is the common ground between the progressive Left and religious Right: the willingness to employ the unlimited power of government to achieve their fantastical aims. But the American experiment in human freedom, for all of its flaws, is a rebuke to the Hobbesian project. The American Revolution in self-government was a Lockean revolution, and its renewal is inconceivable apart from the religious ideals that gave it birth.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The National Interest: Herbert Hoover in the USSR: The Greatest Humanitarian Campaign in History

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

A few months before the end of the First World War, when the White Russians were fighting to overturn the incipient communist regime in Moscow, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the deployment of 13,000 American troops to help them. Herbert Hoover, who led U.S. relief efforts in Europe, told Wilson it was a mistake: it would be better to allow Bolshevism to collapse on its own.

“No greater fortune can come to the world,” Hoover wrote the president in March 1919, “than that these foolish ideas should have an opportunity somewhere of bankrupting themselves.”

Hoover was right about the inevitable collapse of the communist experiment in Russia. The moral bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism would ravage the lives of countless millions of people over the next seventy years. But Hoover could not have anticipated the immediate horrific consequences of its ideology.

A drought, aggravated by Vladimir Lenin’s “collective system of agriculture”—by which the state seized the property and the produce of Russian peasants—left the Soviet economy in ruins. By the summer of 1921, at least 35 million people were at risk of starvation. In desperation, Moscow instructed Maxim Gorky, the famous novelist, to issue an appeal to the West for aid. Hoover responded in a July 23 telegram that set into motion the largest and most successful humanitarian relief effort in history.

Under Hoover’s leadership, the American Relief Administration (ARA), a private organization, set up 19,000 relief stations in the Soviet Union, from Ukraine to Siberia, delivering food, clothing, and medicine. Employing barely three hundred Americans alongside 120,000 Russians, the ARA fed 10.5 million people per day. It is estimated that the American effort rescued at least ten million people from death by starvation and disease. Historian Anatoly Utkin, grandson of one of the survivors, told an interviewer for The American Experience, that “there was not a spark of hope anywhere. Unexpectedly, without any reason, nobody could explain why Americans came, why they provided food for children.”

It is hard to think of another individual who could have orchestrated such a massive operation of human and physical resources. Before entering politics, Hoover had been a successful mining engineer with business interests all over the world. But he was hungry for a larger cause. It arrived in 1914, during the First World War. When Germany invaded neutral Belgium, the civilian population was caught between a hostile army and a British naval blockade. Seven million Belgians faced starvation.

Hoover convinced the belligerent nations to allow his newly created Commission for Relief in Belgium to purchase and deliver food to the destitute Belgians. All of the organization’s initial volunteers were Americans. Throughout the war and beyond, Hoover’s volunteers delivered assistance to 9 million civilians in Belgium and German-occupied France. As historian George Nash describes it, Hoover created “an elaborate, voluntary enterprise without precedent in human history: an organized rescue of an entire nation from starvation.” Hoover became an international hero, “the embodiment of a new force in global politics: American benevolence.”

The American relief effort in the Soviet Union was, indeed, an astonishing act of benevolence. No other nation on earth possessed the democratic idealism, the economic resources, and the national will to carry out an effort on such a massive scale.

Yet it was also a political act: an attempt to persuade Russians to abandon communism and embrace the democratic capitalism of the West. As Bertrand Patenaude explains in The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, Hoover hoped that the example of American efficiency and entrepreneurship would further discredit the “murderous tyranny” in Moscow. “Hoover believed that if he could only relieve the Russians’ hunger,” Patenaude writes, “they would return to their senses and recover the physical strength to throw off their Bolshevik oppressors.”

However unlikely that hope might have been, the Politburo and its apparatchiks must have worried. The communists attempted to control and discredit the U.S. program whenever they felt threatened. “As for the hooverites,” Lenin warned, “we must shadow them with all our might.” But Hoover kept the operation apolitical. He instructed his team that any American who involved himself in politics in Russia would immediately be removed from the mission.

Determined to shift responsibility for the crisis to outside forces, the communist leadership in Moscow portrayed themselves as stewards of the national interest ready to marshall every resource possible to rescue a grateful population from ruin. Liberal elites in the West swallowed the propaganda wholesale. In a report dated October 15, 1921, for example, The New York Times praised Lenin’s “scheme of decentralization” for “developing a national Russian feeling, as opposed to a merely communist viewpoint.” The Kremlin, explained the Times, had “worked feverishly” to get food to starving people. “Imbued with the idea that the Government was straining every nerve to help the nation, all classes and factions have given their unreserved co-operation.”

In fact, the Bolsheviks used food as a weapon—diverting assistance from children to their political allies—and never fully confronted the enormity of the catastrophe facing the Soviet people. “People had been reduced to eating weeds mixed up with ground bones, tree bark, and clay, as well as horses, dogs, cats, rats and the straw from roofs,” writes historian Cynthia Haven. “The government made efforts to stop the selling of human flesh and posted guards in cemeteries to prevent raiding.”

Hoover’s reputation as both a tough anti-communist and effective humanitarian helped him to win popular support for the U.S. effort. In 1921, Congress appropriated $20 million for assistance under the Russian Famine Relief Act, an unprecedented commitment of public money for a political foe. Millions more came from private donations, many from America’s children, who wrote letters to their Russian counterparts. As Hoover noted, the United States delivered about 700,000 tons of corn, wheat seed, clothing, and medicine “as an absolute gift.”

Here is the humanitarian tradition that the world instantly associates with the United States: a tradition rooted in its Judeo-Christian culture and in the belief that America has a unique role in defending human rights and democratic freedom around the globe. Here, in fact, is American exceptionalism without apology—a concept loathsome to the progressive left, but nonetheless, the motivating force behind a national act of compassion unmatched in the history of human civilization.

In July 1923, upon the completion of the humanitarian mission, the Commissars in the Kremlin hosted a dinner for Hoover’s staff. “The Union of the Socialist Soviet Republics,” they said, “never will forget the aid rendered to them by the American People.” In the same year, the communist party’s chief ideologist, Nikolai Bukharin, declared: “We need Marxism plus Americanism.” In truth, the Soviets could never combine the two, and they soon expunged the story of American generosity from their history books.

Hoover, who went on to become president in 1929, is typically criticized for his handling of the economic crisis that produced the Great Depression. Nevertheless, through five decades of public service, no statesman did more in the first half of the twentieth century to strengthen America’s identity as an indispensable defender of human dignity. In 1948, reflecting on his travels, Hoover summarized what he believed the United States meant to people around the world:

I have seen America in contrast with many nations and races. My profession took me into many foreign lands under many kinds of government. I have worked with their great spiritual leaders and their great statesmen. I have worked in governments of free men, of tyrannies, of Socialists and of Communists. I have met with princes, kings, despots, and desperadoes … I was associated in their working lives and problems. I had to deal with their governments. And outstanding everywhere to these great masses of people there was a hallowed word—America. To them, it was the hope of the world.

A century ago, America’s intervention on behalf of a political enemy did not only lay bare the abysmal failure of communism as a political ideology. It also revealed the extraordinary generosity, ingenuity, and dynamism of a nation composed of free men and women. America: the hope of the world.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The National Interest: To Many Refugees, America Is Still the Land of Hope

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

The human catastrophe engulfing Afghanistan following the withdrawal of U.S. troops has made a mockery of America’s image as a safe harbor for the persecuted peoples of the world. Cynicism about the United States and its role on the world stage is the mood of the hour. But a remedy for cynicism is the discipline of memory: My trip to this tiny, ragged island in the Tyrrhenian Sea has reminded me of why so many people still look to America when their futures seem bleak.

A century ago, in 1921, Giuseppe Aiello left his home in Ventotene, boarded the S.S. Patria and sailed from Naples to New York City. The boat manifest listed his occupation as “barber.” He was 16 years old. Though he had little education and spoke virtually no English, he found work and learned his trade. Eventually, he owned his own barbershop in midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks from Pennsylvania Station.

The barber was my grandfather, one of ten children belonging to Vincenzo and Marianna Aiello. Though some of his siblings would follow him to the United States, he never saw his parents again. Given the profound importance of la famiglia among Italians, my grandfather made one of the most painful decisions imaginable. Many other Italians did likewise: From 1920 to 1924, roughly 250,000 of them left everything to come to the United States. Why?

Just as in Afghanistan today, the ravages of war had much to do with it. The industrialized carnage of the First World War left the European economies bankrupt. Even though Italy was on the winning side of the conflict, its society was in tatters. About 578,000 soldiers were dead. Returning soldiers faced a staggering degree of poverty, with few job prospects. On top of it all, the Influenza virus killed nearly as many Italians as did the Great War.

By 1921, Italy was on the edge of a massive breakdown in law and order. The parliament was corrupt, the monarchy unloved. There were fears of a communist takeover. Writes historian R. J. B. Bosworth: “For Italy, least of the great powers, poorest of the great economies, most fragile of the great societies … the conversion from war to peace entailed a sea of troubles.” The country was ripe for an ideology that promised to restore the glory that was Rome.

Enter Benito Mussolini. An ex-communist, Mussolini founded his fascist party in 1919. Within two years, he and his “Black-shirts” swept into power, declaring the end of Italy’s experiment in liberal democracy. “For the Fascist, everything is in the State,” he proclaimed, “and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.” It is a maxim that could come from the lips of the Taliban: fascism under the banner of the Islamic state.

Mussolini mocked what he called “the putrid corpse of liberty” and intended to preside over its funeral. In 1926, his fascist government wiped away the remnants of democracy and civil rights: Opposition political parties and trade unions were banned; freedom of the press was quashed, and there were restrictions on travel abroad.

Next began a policy of “mandatory residency,” in which thousands of political opponents were rounded up and relocated to remote islands. Chief among them was the island of Ventotene.

In ancient Rome, Ventotene was a prison island, where the Caesars sent their adulterous wives and daughters. Criminals, radicals, persecuted Christians—all carved out a desperate existence on Ventotene. Mussolini revived its reputation. At least 2,000 Italians were imprisoned here under his regime, and there are signs scattered around the island to mark the locations of detainment. Gift stores even sell T-shirts emblazoned with the words, isola di confino, island of confinement.

In 1945, the Italians would finally come to despise “Il Duce”—but only after he nearly destroyed the country through his wartime alliance with Hitler’s Germany. Mussolini was executed before a cheering crowd. According to an eyewitness, it was “as if the whole thing was a dream from which we would awake to find the world unchanged.”

The Italians who were fortunate enough to escape Italy during the fever of fascism nurtured another dream. To be sure, the United States was not always a welcoming place. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, for example, drastically cut immigration from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Thanks to bigotry and xenophobia, one of the major aims of the legislation was keeping out the Italians.

Yet even at its ugliest, the United States looked like a haven of sanity in a world gone mad. It must have looked that way to my grandfather. It surely looks that way today, to the thousands of Afghans desperate to be rescued from the Taliban.

If we open our doors, they will enrich our national life. For it is a familiar story. Like countless other immigrants whose life prospects compelled them to leave home, my grandfather grew to love his adopted country. He bought a house in Brooklyn, married, had four children, thirteen grandchildren, and twenty-three great-grandchildren.

A century ago, he made a choice for all of us: America.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com